Jade Walker Making an ‘Ultra’ Gutsy Effort

One of our wonderful supporters, Jade Walker, recently completed the Ultra Marathon along the Great Ocean Road, in support of GI cancer research – spurred on by a close friend diagnosed with a digestive cancer. Here is her post event update …

So I somehow did it! Beginning the run at 7:30 Saturday morning and finishing at 2am Sunday morning, 18.5 hours of running/walking.

Thank you so much to everyone for their love and support, either before the run, during it and after, it has all really just blown me away!

The most important update being that during the run my fundraising jumped to nearly $3,500! This was why I attempted this crazy run, so I’m so excited to have raised this much for the GI Cancer Institute, in honour of my beautiful friend with Cancer.

It has definitely taken me a little while to process the magnitude of it all and realise I actually did it! I don’t have too many pics, more of the first leg, as after that I had to keep all my energy to keep doing my Forest Gump thing.

The whole experience was just amazing! It was epic, shattering, crazy, amazing, tearful, scary and so much more in between. It really was an adventure, the course was filled with so many adventures, just to name a few:

* Running around the bottom of amazing cliffs on the beach and getting smashed by waves up to my belly button.

* Literally rock climbing along the beach, under cliffs for an hour!

* Getting literally lost in the bush and walking an extra 11kms off track. Luckily my angel friend Jem was tracking me along the way and called me to alert me that a fellow runner and I were no longer on the track. Realising afterwards all the hard work and beautiful updates on fb that this amazing friend of mine was up to, blew me away 💕

* The most amazing views of the Great Ocean Road I could ever see in my lifetime – I was so privileged to do this! That was my mantra when I was struggling, running alone and or hurting, ‘I am privileged to see all this and do something so epic!’

* I met some amazing people that I was so lucky to run with, the one in particular that I was lost with – we stuck together until the very end. Calling ourselves ‘besties in the bush’ in the end, talking about everything from our first kiss to what we wanted to in life and everything in between. We ran, walked, shuffled and cried together for around 6 hours of the run.

* Finding out afterwards the lengths my partner went to to support me along the way; waiting in the cold, hail and rain at 2am for me to finish. Thank you and I hope you know how much your support meant to me.

* Having injured my right ankle in training, I managed to roll my left ankle on the last leg and had to continue to the end with this.

When I have a friend going through all she is, that was nothing. This beautiful lady was always in the back of my mind and sending me beautiful messages of support through the entire 100km, so I could never have quit and I made it. 💪💕